It’s raining yet again

… at Casa NewMexiKen this evening. Will this horrible weather ever stop?

Florida, Now and Then

A satellite photo of the Florida peninsula (left) and another (right) indicating what it will look like when the sea rises 18-20 feet.

From The New York Review of Books, “The Threat to the Planet,” by Jim Hansen.

Kind of silly to pour billions of dollars into rescuing the Everglades, don’t you think?

As, like, whatever

From Wannabe Hippie (with thanks to Veronica for the pointer), a collection of analogies and metaphors from high school English. Don’t miss it; some examples:

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

The Size of Our World

Relatively speaking, a speck. Take a look.

Thanks to Amy for the pointer.

The Sins of American Sportscasting

American TV sportscasting is full of factoids, full of graphics, full of breakaways from the midst of play for prerecorded human-interest backgrounders, full of color analysts overexplaining what happened a couple of minutes ago even as new, more urgent things are happening in front of our eyes, full of overpacked broadcast booths with three-man teams, sideline reporters, spotters, graphics people and telestrators, all breathlessly jostling for air time. Goals are scored in hockey games, and instead of showing the players celebrating, hyperactive producers cut away to show coaches, random crowd shots, the empty net, the goalie whose expression is hidden behind his mask. A single football play cannot pass without two instant replays; lineups cannot be given without film clips of the players saying their own names. At any given moment in a baseball game, what you’ll hear is the studied casualness of the down-home, nothing-really-exciting-going-on-here play-calling tradition that O’Brien personifies.

All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand. It’s not just soccer, of course — for many U.S. sports fans, it has long been impossible to listen to the type of football telecasts epitomized by Al Michaels, John Madden and the overproduced Monday Night Football franchise. John Davidson’s interruptions wherever there is an American hockey telecast has driven those few fans who care about them to the Internet for local radio connections. And so on down the line. The common denominator in the way American TV covers any sport is the absence of the simple, urgent description of what is happening on the field, the court or the ice — the single most visceral thing for any fan watching any sport he or she cares about.

That is the very experience the Spanish-language World Cup telecasts give English-language viewers: the sense of urgency, of excitement, of drama. There are no departures to explain what the rules are, no fancy graphics to present statistical factoids, no interruptions to show personal profiles. In Spanish, the narrative is the thing, and even though anglophones may not be able to follow that narrative perfectly, its primacy is so compelling as to be prefereable to the ESPN/ABC model.

Jeff Z. Klein World Cup ’06, from a longer commentary on World Cup coverage

Amen! Given the choice, NewMexiKen would choose to watch most sports on TV with just the players, crowd and public address sound.

Best line of the day, so far

“The irony is that when it comes to terror threats, the Administration has decided that a 1% chance is enough to impel decisive action. But when it comes to the global climate change that could wipe out most of the world’s coastal cities and threaten civilization itself, even near certainty is not enough to provoke action.”

Andrew Tobias

The line

NewMexiKen believes there is a fine line in professional sports between athletic competition and unabashed show business — pro wrestling is the best example of the wrong side of the line.

The fights in the NHL pushed that league over the line, but it has mostly pulled itself back. The NBA dances with the line but usually stays on the athletic side. Honoring the line is why the NFL discourages celebration and taunting. (My advice: When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.)

It seems to NewMexiKen that the melodrama over fouls in professional soccer, especially in international competition, with the moaning and groaning, and the silly mandatory stretcher, push the sport — at times — precariously close to the line.

Best line of the day, so far

“I’m covering my seventh World Cup, and love the event, but I can understand if Americans who catch a glimpse of soccer are turned off by the weasel code in which players fake grievous, perhaps even mortal, injury.”

George Vescey, The New York Times, who adds:

I’m not a big fan of American football — I get bored between downs — but I admit that the American game does not reward a player for rolling on the turf like a man possessed by evil spirits in a science-fiction flick. That’s downright unmanly, by our standards. Jim Brown used to lope stoically back to the huddle after every play because he never wanted to show pain. “You can’t hurt me,” was his attitude.

A $31 Billion Gift Between Friends

In an earlier interview with Charlie Rose, Mr. Buffett explained the role he played in Mr. Gates’s engagement in 1994 to his wife, with whom he has had three children. The couple flew into Omaha, where they met Mr. Buffett at Borsheim’s, the jeweler that Berkshire Hathaway has owned for years.

“Look, Bill, this is none of your business, but when I got married, I spent 6 percent of my net worth on the ring,” he recalled saying to Mr. Gates, who at the time had a net worth already well into the billions. “I don’t know how much you love Melinda.”

Mr. Gates can get his jabs in, too. He has said publicly that his daughter calls Mr. Buffett “the man who works at Dairy Queen,” a needle at Mr. Buffett’s oft-expressed love for the company, which he owns, and its signature product.

The New York Times

A Perfect Storm Descends on the Nation’s Capital

In the White House, only hours after that old elm had fallen, Bush was addressed by a reporter, thus: “I know that you are not planning to see Al Gore’s new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?”

“I have said consistently,” answered Bush, “that global warming is a serious problem. There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary … to be good stewards of the environment, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil…”

The President — as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find — is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said — as he also did a few weeks ago — that “There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused” … well, there really is no such debate.

At least none above what is proverbially called “the flat earth society level.”

Not one scientist of any credibility on this subject has presented any evidence for some years now that counters the massive and repeated evidence — gathered over decades and come at in dozens of ways by all kinds of professional scientists around the world — that the burning of fossil fuels is raising the world’s average temperature.

Or that counters the findings that the burning of these fuels is doing so in a way that is very dangerous for mankind, that will almost certainly bring increasingly devastating effects in the coming decades.

One small group of special interest businesses leaders — those of some fossil fuel companies — have been well documented by journalist Ross Gelbspan and others to have been fighting a PR campaign for 15 years to keep the American public confused about the wide and deep scientific consensus on this.

They’ve aimed, as Gelbspan explains, to keep us thinking that (to borrow the president’s words this morning) “There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused” — though no open and thorough journalism this reporter knows of can find any such thing.

Bill Blakemore, ABC News

Petroglyph National Monument (New Mexico)

… was authorized on this date in 1990.

As you walk among the petroglyphs, you are not alone. This world is alive with the sights and sounds of the high desert – a hawk spirals down from the mesa top, a roadrunner scurries into fragrant sage, a desert millipede traces waves in the sand. There is another presence beyond what we can see or hear. People who have lived along the Rio Grande for many centuries come alive again through images they carved on the shiny black rocks. These images, and associated archeological sites in the Albuquerque area, provide glimpses into a 12,000 year long story of human life in this area.

Petroglyph National Monument stretches 17 miles along Albuquerque’s West Mesa, a volcanic basalt escarpment that dominates the city’s western horizon. Authorized June 27, 1990, the 7,236 acre monument is cooperatively managed by the National Park Service and the City of Albuquerque.

Petroglyph National Monument protects a variety of cultural and natural resources including five volcanic cones, hundreds of archeological sites and an estimated 25,000 images carved by native peoples and early Spanish settlers. Many of the images are recognizable as animals, people, brands and crosses; others are more complex. Their meaning, possibly, understood only by the carver. These images are inseparable from the greater cultural landscape, from the spirits of the people who created them, and all who appreciate them.

Petroglyph National Monument is a place of respect, awe and wonderment.

Petroglyph National Monument

Pecos National Monument (New Mexico)

… was redesignated Pecos National Historical Park on this date in 1990.

Pecos preserves 12,000 years of history including the ancient pueblo of Pecos, two Spanish Colonial Missions, Santa Fe Trail sites, 20th century ranch history of Forked Lightning Ranch, and the site of the Civil War Battle of Glorieta Pass.

Pecos National Historical Park

James Smithson

… died on this date in 1829.

Smithson’s will left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But should his nephew die without children—legitimate or illegitimate—a contingency clause stated that the estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge…”

Source: The Smithsonian Institution

The nephew did indeed die without children and in 1838 approximately $500,000 in gold was brought to the United States. After a decade of indecision and debate about how best to carry out the bequest, the Smithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress (1846).

Here’s what that gift has led to:

• African Art Museum
• Air and Space Museum and Udvar-Hazy Center
• American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery
• American History Museum
• American Indian Museum
• Anacostia Museum (African American history and culture)
• Arts and Industries Building (Discovery Theater)
• Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
• Freer and Sackler Galleries (Asian art)
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (modern and contemporary art)
• National Zoo
• Natural History Museum
• Portrait Gallery
• Postal Museum
• Smithsonian Institution Building (the Castle)